We are a highly-intelligent species and yet we are often not able to resolve or often even recognize the stuff going on in our own heads. Why is that?
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Your mind is like a forest. Footpaths (neural pathways) are developed in the forest a few different ways: repetition, trauma, pleasure, etc. Once you receive a stimulus, you generate a response. After a few times (or only once if it’s something super traumatic) you develop a neural pathway: If I see this, I do this. Or, if I hear this, I feel that. You’re the only person in the forest, so you go where you please and think what you want. When you invite a 3rd party to walk your forest, you’re allowing them to point out things you can’t see because you’re only ever likely to traverse your own existing paths. Talking to you in your own forest, a therapist might say “I’ve noticed that every time you get to this point in the forest, you always take this path that leads to you feeling sad. Let’s try this other path.” Your willingness to talk to a therapist in the first place is your license to try a new path, or at the very least to observe and understand the fact that you are indeed traversing the same paths over and over.
If you’ve come this far in my analogy, perhaps you’d be willing to go a little further: Cannabis lifts you above the treeline so you can see your destination more clearly and perhaps a better path to get there, but when you come down, you’re still in charge of walking those new paths yourself. Psychedelics like psilocybin are a like a massive rain storm on your forest that washes away some of your pathways and lets you create new ones. Take a peek at any emerging psychedelic therapy and you’ll see that we’re finally just barely starting to understand the brain a little.
Because therapy isn’t a kind of procedure, it’s a kind of relationship.
A lot of people here think this is about knowing something (like what an automatic thought is or how to do a breathing exercise) or having insight (recognizing your own motives and biases). Those people aren’t exactly wrong, but that isn’t the answer to your question. Really, there are a certain group of people for whom self-help books work quite well, and those are the people for whom the only thing they don’t have is information. But most people don’t do well with self-help books, because they’re lacking something more than information.
It’s tempting to think of therapy as a medical procedure similar to diabetes treatment, where you get educated, take medicines, perform exercises, change habits and get better from your illness. This is not entirely untrue (you need to do most of those things to do better), but thinking in this way gets confusing, because therapists who focus only on those things tend to be ineffective, and because two therapists who do completely opposite/disagreeing education and exercises can be equally effective. It turns out, a lot of what makes a therapist effective is the way that they help you form goals, keep you accountable, believe in you and care for you/show you kindness.
for more, see here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_factors_theory
It depends on the type of therapy but there are some that *need* the therapist because the treatment *is* the relationship.
It’s a bit like learning to swim without water.
Here’s an example:
– Unconditional positive regard.
Let’s say you tell your therapist you want to punch the living shit out of your wife. Most friends etc would say, “don’t do that” or “your wife’s a bitch” or “just leave her, Terry” but a therapist would support you in that and say, “Wow! You sound *furious* with her. And I can see why. She knows you hate it when she takes the remote control, right”.
It’s a nice feeling to be wholly accepted, supported, and encouraged. To be treated as wonderful and perfect and as though all your shit bits make sense.
“I just don’t get it. It’s like she does it on purpose to wind me up. Aaaaargh” you complain.
“Aaaargh” responds the therapist to show he understands your fury. You feel understood. “Aaaargh” was exactly what you need to hear. You feel “got”.
With time multiple things happen…
1. You just calm down. You feel less alone in the world and more connected. Connected in a way you never knew existed and can’t quite describe. “She just listens” you tell people, “but it works”.
2. You learn to empathise with yourself. The words of the therapist echo in your head and they become like a security blanket for yourself.
3. The relationship you have with your therapist starts to become the relationship you have with others. The wife takes remote… and you treat her like the therapist treated you. You see that she’s also perfect and doing her best (just like you) and you start to appreciate her for taking the remote cos you see it was her way of saying, “I want your love today” (or whatever).
So, to repeat, it’s the relational experience that’s “therapeutic” not the therapist themself. And you can’t really do that solo.
Another side is to wonder why you’d want to do it alone. What is it about your “self” that makes you think, “I don’t need help, I’ll just read books and be fine alone”.
If you’re like that, how can you ever escape that without at some point letting someone else in?!
It’s a big deal to let someone in, to let someone get close, to let someone help and be there for you. And so most people who want to do it solo have relational issues going on.
Or they can’t afford it. Which is the same thing, innit?! Cos that means they have a bad relationship with money.
You can. Just like normal doctors, psychologists just do their best to facilitate the body’s healing of itself. With the brain it’s less automatic than a broken leg though, and more about you having to make changes. What you need to change can be hard to figure out on your own though; just like fixing a broken leg would be.
Reality is perceived and produced by each of us. What you “know” may be inaccurate, harmful, overblown, etc. It’s more difficult to judge with only one perspective.
There are some therapies that attempt to teach individuals to be their own therapist. An example is DBT. Begin with mindfulness exercises, and practice describing your troubles. DBT consists of a set of exercises for handling interpersonal problems, tolerating distress, and responding to emotions.
It’s actually incredibly effective for people with personality troubles.
I’m an engineer, and there are times I am trying to solve a problem and even though I’m smart and know all the info about the problem, it is incredibly helpful to have outside input from another perspective.
I imagine mental health is the same, your brain thinks a certain way and it’s hard to come up with new ways to fix a problem when you come up with the same solutions, but having an outside perspective leads to clarity you couldn’t come up with alone.
My mom is a big Christmas person. Like $1000 on gifts for people every year. I asked her why she doesn’t spend more like $100-200 on gifts (still excessive imo) and keep $800-900 to spend on herself. She said because she’d feel selfish and guilty. I then asked her if I told her I had $1000, and said I was only gonna spend $200 on gifts because I wanted to spend the $800 on myself, would she see me as selfish and want me to feel guilty?
She said no, you earned it.
Sorry for the paragraph, just wanted to show that people can tend to be unnecessarily mean to themselves even though when they see the same thing in another person they show kindness. We have to learn how to be kind to ourselves, which is hard. As other redditors have said here, we know everything about ourselves, so it’s easy to dismiss the idea that you deserve kindness by saying “Yeah well, if they knew THIS about me, then they wouldn’t think I deserve anything!”
We can and do, a lot of people don’t just run to a therapist the moment they drop a can of soda on the floor they pick themselves up work through it. It’s hard to explain and the vast majority of people don’t even know they’re doing it but that’s the difference between someone with an illness and someone without. The person without is able to gather their thoughts the person with will just sink into a pit
Been in therapy 10 years.
ELI5 summary:
It’s like if you want to drive a car. You can wish all you want to know how to drive that car, but if you don’t have the skills to do it, you’ll just crash. Therapy is like learning how to drive a car. You’re learning skills you don’t have from someone who does.
Further insight:
It’s true you could figure skills out from reading a self help book, and sometimes those do have insight. But the car analogy is pretty spot on, you can’t just grab a driver’s manual and start long haul trucking. There’s a whole learning curve. Things like healthy emotional regulation should be modeled for kids, but if parents aren’t super attentive, this may not happen.
Lastly… I’m also a buddhist, and buddhism is sort of low grade cognitive behavioral therapy. So there is kind of a model for performing therapy on yourself.
Buddhism has the four noble truths:
1.) Existence is suffering
2.) Suffering leads to truth
3.) Truth leads to enlightenment
4.) The eightfold path is the way
If I’m in pain… I acknowledge it, try and determine why… I just broke up with my girlfriend of 2 1/2 years about three months ago.
1.) I’m in pain over the breakup
2.) I’m in pain because I don’t like being alone
3.) I don’t enjoy being alone with myself
This tracks with what I’m currently working on in therapy. So the plan is to enjoy my own company first, before I seek out another person to complete me.
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